Ema Štern
24 years old
The Clarinet
“There was always music at our home. Early on in secondary school, I already knew that I would be engaged in music and attend an academy, even though I was also quite good at other things. I also loved languages and attended competitions in Croatian language, but when the day came when I had to write down my priorities, I wrote the Academy of Music in Zagreb as the only choice. I said to myself then: ‘Either I will succeed, and that’s it, or I won’t, and there’s absolutely nothing else I could do and still feel like myself.’”